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Ear rumbling is a special 'superpower' that not everyone has

Can you do this?

via Eltpics / Twitter

Mapping out the structure of the inner ear.

There are no two human beings who are exactly alike. One of the funny quirks of evolution is that some of us can do things with our bodies we think are routine, but are impossible for others.

Some people can wiggle their ears, others can't. Some can wiggle their nose like Samantha from "Bewitched" while others just look really silly when making an attempt.

Not everyone can lick their elbow but most wouldn't attempt to do so in public.

A Twitter user named Massimo dropped some knowledge about a skill that not everyone has and even fewer discuss: ear rumbling.

Those of us who can do it know exactly what it is, while it's a mystery to those who cannot.

People who can ear rumble have the ability to control the tensor tympani, a muscle within the ear. Contracting the muscle creates a rushing, rumbling sound that, if flexed enough, can drown out a significant amount of noise.

This can be useful when someone is saying something that you don't want to hear but don't want to be rude and cover your ears. It can come in real handy if someone is about to spoil your favorite TV show or if you live with someone who can't stop nagging.

Some people cannot voluntarily create the rumbling sound but hear it when they let out a large yawn.

There's a Reddit sub-forum just for ear rumblers with over 60,000 people. Here's how some of them get rumblin'.

"I just squeeze the muscle in my ears I guess," — melvinthefish

"When I flex and hold whatever I'm manipulating to do that, I get my rumble," — ttywzl

"I get a mild rumble just doing the usual flex, but i can make it a bit louder by bringing my top lip up to my nose," — Willmono7

"The best way I can describe it is I 'squint my ears,'" —SteeleIT

The muscle exists to mask-low frequency sounds so we can focus on those at a higher frequency. It also works to mute sounds we create ourselves such as eating potato chips or coughing. It's a way that helps us from becoming annoyed with our own bodies.

Unfortunately, the muscle has a rather slow reaction time so it cannot prevent us from hearing loud sudden noises like a gunshot or a book slamming on the ground.

Massimo's tweet caused quite a stir on the platform.

Although scientists have known about ear rumbling since at least the 1800s, there doesn't appear to have been too much research on the topic. We know that some can rumble and others cannot, but it's unclear how it breaks down percentage-wise or if it's more prevalent in certain groups.

The good news is that the word is starting to get out and people who've been rumbling all their lives suddenly don't feel so alone.


This article originally appeared on 03.05.20

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5 fun facts about St. Patrick's Day to wow your friends and family

Saint Patrick wasn't Irish and neither is corned beef.

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Several St. Patrick's Day traditions didn't originally come from Ireland.

Shamrocks, leprechauns, corned beef and cabbage, pinches for those who forget to wear green—St. Patrick's Day is filled with traditions that have passed down from generation to generation. What began as a religious holiday in Ireland over 1,000 years ago to honor Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, has morphed into a raucous celebration of all things Irish here across the pond.

Ironically, however, some of those traditions and "all things Irish" didn't actually come from Ireland—including Saint Patrick himself.

If you want to impress your friends with some interesting St. Patrick's day trivia, here's a handful of fun facts to put in your pocket.

1. Saint Patrick wasn't actually Irish. He was British.

Born in Britain in 386 A.D., St. Patrick was captured by pirates and brought to Ireland at age 16, where he was sold as a slave. For six years, he worked in the fields, tending sheep and praying. One night, he dreamt that God was directing him to a boat that would take him home, and in 408 A.D., he escaped Ireland. Then, after being ordained as a bishop in 432 A.D., the Pope sent him back to the Emerald Isle to spread Christianity.

"Patrick became inflamed with the desire to help alleviate the suffering of the Irish people who were burdened under the yoke of slavery, brutal tribal warfare and pagan idolatry," Matthew Paul Grote, a Catholic priest with the Order of Preachers, shared with USA Today. Saint Patrick incorporated pagan rituals into Christian worship practices to ease the resistance to Christianity. Even when he was attacked and captured by Irish clans, he would respond with non-violence and share his Catholic faith peacefully, always treating non-Christians with fairness.

He is credited with the spread of Christianity in Ireland, but he himself wasn't Irish.

2. The legend about St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland? Literally impossible.

Legend has it that St. Patrick was fasting for 40 days on a hilltop when he was attacked by snakes. With a sermon and a wave of his staff, he drove all the snakes in Ireland out to the sea where they all drowned, which is why, according to the lore, there are no snakes in Ireland.

Except there were never any snakes in Ireland, according to the fossil record. The cool climate and being part of an island make Ireland uninhabitable for snakes. Scholars today generally view the snake story as a metaphor for driving paganism out of Ireland.

3. St. Patrick's Day was not traditionally a festive holiday.

Parades filled with floats, pubs filled with festivity, parties filled with frivolity—all of that fun, celebratory St. Patrick's day revelry is fairly new. For the vast majority of the holiday's history in Ireland, it was a somber, quiet religious holy day spent in prayer. It wasn't until Irish immigrants to America began celebrating their Irish pride in the 1700s with parades and such that the holiday became more of a festive occasion.

According to History.com, the invention of the television let Irish people see how the U.S. celebrated the holiday, which led to the party atmosphere making its way to Ireland.

4. The traditional color associated with St. Patrick was blue, not green.

St. Patrick's Day is all about green green green, from the shamrock shakes to the leprechaun coats to the Irish flag. But the color Saint Patrick himself was actually associated with is blue. The earliest depictions of the patron saint of Ireland show him in blue garments, and according to The Smithsonian, when George III created the Order of St. Patrick, a new order of chivalry for the Kingdom of Ireland, its official color was known as "St. Patrick's Blue."

Green is more of a political color than a religious one, as it became the color of Irish nationalism in 1789 with a series of rebellions against the UK. And really, green makes the most sense as a symbol for a place known as The Emerald Isle. The shamrock helps, too. (Another fun fact: The green, white and orange flag of Ireland was officially adopted in 1937 and points directly to the contemporary history between the Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity in the country.)

5. The tradition of eating corned beef didn't come from Ireland, either.

For many Americans, a St. Patrick's Day meal simply must include corned beef and cabbage. Traditional Irish fare, right? Nope.

Though the Irish produced some of the world's most sought-after corned beef in the mid-1600s, they didn't eat it themselves. Due to England's oppressive laws, Irish people couldn't afford beef, and when they could afford meat, they ate salted pork or bacon. (The reason they produced corned beef was due to some complicated history with the UK and cattle shipping restrictions.)

Two centuries later, Irish immigrants who had a bit more money started buying kosher beef from their Jewish immigrant neighbors in America. According to The Smithsonian, what we consider Irish corned beef today was really Jewish corned beef tossed into a stew with some cabbage and potatoes—truly an example of the American immigration "melting pot."

In Ireland today, you'd most likely be served lamb or beef stew for a St. Patrick's Day feast. (However, much like our St. Paddy's Day revelry, the American tradition of corned beef has slowly made its way into Ireland's celebrations as well.)

It's a wee bit funny to dive into the history of St. Patrick's Day and find that many of the things we typically think of as old Irish traditions are neither particularly old (compared to Saint Patrick himself) nor purely Irish. That's not to say these traditions are not worth celebrating; Irish Americans have their own storied history in the U.S., after all, and who doesn't love a dyed green river or a green-themed parade with lucky shamrocks and leprechauns?

No matter how you celebrate, have a very Happy St. Patrick's Day! Or as they say in Irish Gaelic, "Beannachtaí na Féile Padraig ort!" (Watch how to pronounce it below.)

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The surprisingly interesting history behind the phrase 'dead as a doornail'

Malcolm P.L./YouTube

A doornail really is deader than a regular nail.

"Old Marley was as dead as a doornail."

Charles Dickens' line from "A Christmas Carol" is probably the most famous example of the phrase "dead as a doornail," but it's certainly not the only one. Shakespeare used it in Henry IV Part 2: "Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more." An unnamed poet used the idiom for the first time in print in a poem published in 1350, but it's still not uncommon to hear it used today.

"Dead as a doornail" obviously means dead, deceased, definitively not alive. But why a doornail and not just a nail? All nails are dead by their nature of being metal, right? So why even use a nail at all? Why not "dead as a door" or "dead as a rock"? Those are dead, too. What makes a doornail specifically deader than other dead things?

There's a surprisingly interesting answer to that question. As it turns out there really is a good reason for specifying a doornail to convey being really, truly dead.

YouTube creator Malcolm P.L., who mostly makes videos about the history of armor, shared an explanation as well as a demonstration of what a doornail actually is:

So it turns out that a doornail isn't just a nail in a door, but a nail that cannot be removed and reused. Way back when, nails were made by hand and quite valuable. People would salvage and repurpose nails whenever they could. The way doornails were bent and driven into the backside of a door made it virtually impossible for them to be reused as a nail.

So not only are doornails dead simply because they're nails, but because their future potential for any other use is also dead. They are doubly dead, if you will. Extra deceased.

How many other idioms do we commonly use without knowing their full origins? Let the cat out of the bag? The whole nine yards? Spill the beans? Get someone's goat?

Language is so fascinating. Time to do some Googling.


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A comic published in 1997 predicted online schooling in 2021 with eerie accuracy

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In 1997, we used the internet primarily for email and for the novelty of being able to look things up on the "worldwide web." The internet as we know it wasn't even 10 years old and was a tiny fraction of one percent the size it is now. Speeds that seemed fast then would make us throw our laptops at the wall now. There was no Google, no social media, no Zoom. This is what the top search engine looked like:

Wayback Machine

We knew the internet had some potential, but we had no idea how reliant we would become on it for pretty much everything. Our vision of what the future might hold still looked like the Jetsons in many ways. Flying cars. Bulbous architecture. Inexplicably pointy clothing. Some kind of cool communication devices that would allow us to see one another's faces in real-time.

And yet, Archie Comics got one thing eerily right in a 1997 Betty comic titled "High School 20201 A.D." Virtual, online school.

Of course, it wasn't happening due to a pandemic, but was simply the way school happens in their imagined future.

"Kids today are SO lucky! They're able to go to school in their own home!" says Betty's Dad. "They never have to carry books to school...and they never have to worry about the weather!"

Flashback to this winter, when schools contemplated whether or not to have "snow days" for kids doing school at home.

"'Scue me, folks!" says Betty. "Class is about to begin!" She sits in front a definitely-not-2021-accurate computer with a hilariously huge camera atop it, but the basic gist is spot on. Especially when we see the sign on the wall that reads "VIDEO MONITOR MUST REMAIN UNCOVERED AT ALL TIMES."

Kids turning off their cameras was one of the hundreds of challenges teachers have had to deal with through the 2020-2021 school year. Phew.

Screenshots of the first page of the comic have gone viral on social media as people point out how bonkers it is that the comic pinpointed this year for their online, at-home schooling idea. Snopes had to do a fact-check as people asked if it was real, and Archie Comics themselves wrote up a page on their site about the prescient comic.

They wrote:

"The 6-page story, originally titled 'Betty in High School 2021 A.D.' was written by George Gladir, with art by Stan Goldberg, Mike Esposito, Bill Yoshida, and Barry Grossman. In this story we find Betty and her friends in Riverdale dealing with the struggles of virtual home schooling!

When this story was reprinted in 2015, the year in the title was changed to '2104 AD' (probably because we didn't have flying cars yet) but rest assured, the original story was published in 1997 and eerily predicted elements of virtual home schooling now commonly found across the world!"

Archie Comics went ahead and shared the rest of the comic on Facebook, and it's fun to see what was eerily accurate and what was hilariously not.

"My video phone is flashing!" Betty thinks, as her pink magic-mirror-looking phone rings. Remember, most people didn't have cell phones at this point, and smartphones with cameras were a more futuristic idea than flying cars, oddly enough.

And as bizarre a year as it's been, I don't think any schools have instituted "closet detention" for at-home schoolers.

Betty's friends' "special video screen" she puts behind her to make her feel like she's not alone in class is pretty funny, and not terribly unlike the Zoom backgrounds we can virtually put behind ourselves.

They actually overshot a little with the super short skirts, as the micro-mini actually made a comeback in the early 2000s.

And yep, there's the good ol' futuristic flying car. Is there anything we've been more wrong about than the likelihood of flying around in cars by now? I don't think so.

The rest of the comic is the teens checking out the old high school museum, where they could see the cafeteria and bulletin board and "an actual classroom."

And Betty ultimately saying she wished she could "go back to the days of our old and obsolete high school."

Yep. That part's accurate for a lot of actual 2021 students as well.

Virtual schooling has been a mixed bag, with some kids thriving at home without the pressures and social drama of in-person school, while others have struggled without the structure and social stimulation of it. But no one was prepared for the sudden shift to online learning. The past year has been one long stretch of trial and error, forced flexibility, and constant adaptation. And it definitely wasn't the future—or present—any of us had hoped for.

Hopefully, we'll get those flying cars one of these days. In the meantime, we'll settle for basic in-person schooling and some semblance of normalcy.

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